Consumers today are confronted with a bewildering variety of goods and services such as cable television, financial transactions and home shopping catalogues. Currently, consumers must separately access each distinct service. For example, to order a pay-per view movie currently requires contacting a cable television operator through one device, often a telephone, and contacting a bank through a different device, an automatic teller machine or a computer. There are many other examples of the splintering of goods and services amongst different devices, which causes consumer confusion and inefficiency.
Apart from the difficulties from the consumer's standpoint, present technology does not provide for efficient data gathering and similar functions. For example, present opinion polls are typically conducted by telephone, which is expensive and time consuming, which may deter persons from participating in the poll. Other data gathering operations suffer from similar flaws.
Present information technology has further limitations. Despite an existing infrastructure of cable television channels, the television industry has yet to provide consumers with the type of interactivity becoming increasing popular in multimedia applications. There is thus a need for a device that allows existing communication infrastructures to provide real time interactivity for television.
As will be described, the present invention solves the disparate problems presented by current technology by integrating a wide variety of interfaces to goods, services and other information providers within a hand held, portable device. The present invention achieves real time interactivity for television networks or other sources and is convenient for consumers. These and other advantages of the present invention will be apparent from the following description.